Huge Google index on E-commerce site
-
Hi Guys,
I got a question which i can't understand.
I'm working on a e-commerce site which recently got a CMS update including URL updates.
We did a lot of 301's on the old url's (around 3000 /4000 i guess) and submitted a new sitemap (around 12.000 urls, of which 10.500 are indexed).The strange thing is.. When i check the indexing status in webmaster tools Google tells me there are over 98.000 url's indexed.
Doing the site:domainx.com Google tells me there are 111.000 url's indexed.Another strange thing which another forum member describes here :
And next to that old url's (which have a 301 for about a month now) keep showing up in the index.
Does anyone know what i could do to solve the problem?
-
Allright guys, thanks alot for the answers.
Gonna try some things out coming monday.
Canonical url's and pagination (rel=prev) will work i guess.
The hard part is, i'm working on this site with a development company that tells me they can url redirect all the 404's to the homepage while they must be redirected either to other products or category pages.
So only solution is that i have to do that by hand, one by one via a tool they build. But it's a hell of a job!
@ Andy , I checked it and it actually says :
Total indexed : 98.000
Ever crawled: 929.762And when i check the questionmark at total indexed it says:
Total number of url's added to Google index.Thanks again for your answers
-
something to check would be in WMT if you go to the advanced section of the index status chart you should see currently in the index and ever indexed, it sounds like you are just seeing the ever indexed number which could be huge for almost any website.
-
We had similar issues with too many indexed pages (about 100,000 pages) for a site with about 3500 pages.
By setting a canonical url on each page and also preventing google from indexing and crawling some of the urls (robots.txt and meta noindex) we are now down to 3500 urls, The benefit is (besides less duplicate content), much faster indexing of new pages.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
Hi,
A couple of things could be and probably are at work in this situation.
1. For the 301 redirects, if the site is big (12000 urls), depending on how often and much google crawls the site it could easily take more than a month for it to find and identify all the new urls/301 redirects etc and then update its cache of indexed pages. So in this case its is a matter of patience. If the 301s are implemented correctly, they will eventually be indexed.
2. You have done 3 or 4000 301s, for the rest of the the old 12000 urls what are you showing, a 404? It is a big undertaking to redirect that many pages, but worth thinking about the technical side of what is happening, part of your 98000 indexed urls could be a mix of old and new if the old ones are not being redirected to a page that clearly states that they are either somewhere else (301) or no longer available (404).
3. A common problem with e-shops is duplicate content due to various things like product filters, search string variables etc that are going to pages that are indexable and do not have rel canonical tags. A good way to see if this is the case is to search for likely url parts in your cms that could lead to this issue (maybe you have filters that result in urls like xxx?search=123 or xxx?manufacturer=23 etc) and then do a google search along the lines of site:xxx.com inurl:manufacturer which should give a good idea of if/where you have this problem. This case of duplicate content could be even more pronounced if it was occurring on your old cms urls AND your new cms urls and a combination of these are in your 98000 total.
Hope that helps!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Poor Load Balancer Implementation, now the site is indexed 4 times
I was brought on to a project where the network admin has set up a load balancer to distribute traffic but somehow has incorrectly deployed the strategy. Now the site is listed 4 times as links to the primary domain in search console. How can I remove these from the index? I have already requested he no-index them, but they still remain in search console. What else can I do to ensure Google only sees this as a single site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonFerrari21690 -
Trying to get Google to stop indexing an old site!
Howdy, I have a small dilemma. We built a new site for a client, but the old site is still ranking/indexed and we can't seem to get rid of it. We setup a 301 from the old site to the new one, as we have done many times before, but even though the old site is no longer live and the hosting package has been cancelled, the old site is still indexed. (The new site is at a completely different host.) We never had access to the old site, so we weren't able to request URL removal through GSC. Any guidance on how to get rid of the old site would be very appreciated. BTW, it's been about 60 days since we took these steps. Thanks, Kirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates0 -
Why did Google cache & index a different domain than my own?
We own www.homemenorca.com, a real estate website based in Spain. Pages from this domain are not being indexed: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&oq=site%3Awww.homemenorca.com&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59l2.3504j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8Please notice that the URLs are Home Menorca, but the titles are not Home Menorca, they are Fincas Mantolan, a completely different domain and company: http://www.fincasmantolan.com/. Furthermore, when we look at Google's cache of Home Menorca, we see a different website: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&oq=cache%3Awww.homemenorca.com%2Fen&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58j69i59.1311j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8We reviewed Google Search Console, Google Fetch, the canonical tags, the XML sitemap, and many more items. Google Search Console accepted our XML sitemap, but is only indexing 5-10% of the pages. Google is fetching and rendering the pages properly. However, we are not seeing the correct content being indexed in Google. We have seen issues with page loading times, loading content longer than 4 seconds, but are unsure why Google would be indexing a different domain.If you have suggestions or thoughts, we would very much appreciate it.Additional Language Issue:When a user searches "Home Menorca" from America or the UK with "English" selected in their browser as their default language, they are given a Spanish result. It seems to have accurate hreflang annotations within the head section on the HTML pages, but it is not working properly. Furthermore, Fincas Mantolan's search result is listed immediately below Home Menorca's Spanish result. We believe that if we fix the issue above, we will also fix the language issue. Please let us know any thoughts or recommendations that can help us. Thank you very much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CassG12340 -
How to take out international URL from google US index/hreflang help
Hi Moz Community, Weird/confusing question so I'll try my best. The company I work for also has an Australian retail website. When you do a site:ourbrand.com search the second result that pops up is au.brand.com, which redirects to the actual brand.com.au website. The Australian site owner removed this redirect per my bosses request and now it leads to a an unavailable webpage. I'm confused as to best approach, is there a way to noindex the au.brand.com URL from US based searches? My only problem is that the au.brand.com URL is ranking higher than all of the actual US based sub-cat pages when using a site search. Is this an appropriate place for an hreflang tag? Let me know how I can help clarify the issue. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Folder or subdomain for new e-commerce addition
Our main content site has 5K pieces of unique content all targeting our market. We are planning to add e-commerce as a source monetizing our audience. Should we place the new commerce platform within a subdirectory or subdomain? The layout we are considering is... shop name: Brand Name Market http://www.brandname.com/market/ http://market.brandname.com I am also considering something like: http://www.brandname.com/market/ aggregating product details and content from http://market.brandname.com/ with rel= back to the subdomain if possible.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ejovi0 -
Can Someone Provide an Example of a Site that Indexes Search Results Successfully?
So, I know indexing search results is a big no-no, but I recently started working with a site that sees 50% of its traffic from search result pages. The user engagement on these pages is very high, and these pages rank well too. Unfortunately, they've been hit by Panda. They already moved the section of the site with search results to a subdomain, and saw temporary success. There must be a way to preserve their traffic from these search result pages and get out from under Panda.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google isn't displaying the www. for my site in the SERPS
I noticed that every other site url in the serps for my main keywords has a www. on their display url except mine. I have the site set to display the www. Can this potentially hurt my SEO and what can I do to fix this? Thanks Aaron. www.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | afranklin0 -
Do sites with a small number of content pages get penalized by Google?
If my site has just five content pages, instead of 25 or 50, then will it get penalized by Google for a given moderately competitive keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0